This paper gives an account of a teaching experiment on absolute value inequalities, whose aim was to identify characteristics of an approach that would realize the potential of the topic to develop theoretical thinking in students enrolled in prerequisite mathematics courses at a large, urban North American university. The potential is…

Being told procedures and concepts before problem solving can inadvertently undermine the learning of deep structures in physics. If students do not learn the underlying structure of physical phenomena, they will exhibit poor transfer. Two studies on teaching physics to adolescents compared the effects of "telling" students before and after…

This paper presents a new course, Radionavigation Systems, whose laboratory and theoretical components complement each other to enhance student learning. Radionavigation skills and knowledge are taught by means of various instructional methods, and the laboratory successfully merges hands-on learning using specific instrumentation and software…

The authors investigated whether the amount of instructional guidance affects science learning and self-efficacy. Sixty 9- and 10-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of the following three instructional conditions: (a) guided instruction consisting of examples and student-generated explanations, (b) direct instruction consisting of a…

This paper is a qualitative, practice based study describing the use of the Focus-Action-Reflection (FAR) Guide (Harrison & Treagust, 2000) to address the shortcomings of a pedagogical analogical model in Year 10 Science. The aim of this paper is to present my experience of the FAR Guide in relation to an analogical model that gave rise to…

To evoke public emphasis on the professional skills training in vocational education, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan has recently focused on the certificate of information skills. However, the lack of a systematic and institutionally certified instructor training model within Taiwan not only varies the quality of certified instructors,…

This work is part of a research project whose main objective is to understand the impact that the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has on the teaching and learning process on the subject of Physics. We will show that, with the use of a storm simulator, physics students improve their learning process on one hand they understand…

The renewal of the secondary school physics teaching program was initiated in 2008, however, there is limited research investigating physics teachers' enactment of the teaching program in their classes. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe teachers' views about the official teaching program and its implementation. The…

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations…

Headspace (HS) gas chromatography (GC) is commonly used to analyze samples that contain non-volatiles. In 1996, a new sampling technique called single drop microextraction, SDME, was introduced, and in 2001 it was applied to HS analysis. It is a simple technique that uses equipment normally found in the undergraduate laboratory, making it ideal…

We use the theory of communities of practice and the concept of accountable disciplinary knowledge to describe how a learning community develops in the context of an upper-division physics laboratory course. The change in accountable disciplinary knowledge motivates students' enculturation into a community of practice. The enculturation process is…

In this article, I will extend the falling ball method to measure the viscosity of liquids regardless of the degree of their viscosity. For this, I will show that one can obtain a measurement of the terminal velocity of a falling spherical ball in a viscous liquid by solving numerically the equation of motion which describes the dynamics of the…

This paper presents a game of industrialisation, based on a paper airplane, that mimics real world production ramp-up and blends classical engineering courses together. It is based on a low cost product so that it can be mass produced. The game targets graduate students and practitioners in engineering fields. For students, it offers an experiment…

This open-ended practical series titled "Molecular Identification of Unknown Food Bacteria" which extended over a 6-week period was designed with the aims of giving students an opportunity to gain an understanding of naturally occurring food bacteria and skills in contemporary molecular methods using real food samples. The students first isolated…

Human rhinovirus (HRV) is one of the most common human respiratory pathogens and is responsible for the majority of upper respiratory illnesses. Recently, a phylogeny was constructed from all known American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) HRV sequences. From this study, three HRV classifications (HRVA, HRVB, and HRVC) were determined and techniques…